When Your Job Swallows Your Identity: The Rise of Corporate Enmeshment

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the typical work/life balance of teams today, and how it differs from that of generations past. In that article, I spoke about team members enforcing boundaries from opposite ends of the spectrum—those who successfully compartmentalise their work lives and home lives, and those who can’t because the lines between work and home are so blurred, if they even exist at all.

AI has the power to make our lives easier by doing the autonomous work that slows our human output and productivity. Prior to its arrival, we may have imagined this ‘freed-up time’ would be spent with our families, on our hobbies, or just enjoying life.

These are certainly not the outcomes I’ve seen.

Two years ago, author Joanna Maciejewska perfectly captured the brewing cultural frustration:

‘I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.’

She makes a good point when you really think about the tasks AI now commonly completes on our behalf. Given that AI technology has been responsible for a good number of job losses, how do you think anyone still employed may feel about their work/life balance? Do you think they’re more or less likely to down tools when work needs to be done, and the clock has ticked past 5pm?

Or are we likely to see more and more enmeshment?

Enmeshment: A Survival Strategy Driven by Fear

If you’re unaware of the word, enmeshment is an issue that goes far beyond standard ambition or a strong work ethic. The term was originally coined to describe individuals who completely weld their sense of self to their job title, making their professional role their entire personality.

In this current climate, however, enmeshment is no longer just a passive personality trait; it has become a desperate survival strategy. Driven by the acute fear of redundancy and the shadow of AI and automation, employees are at risk of offering up their entire identities as a shield against being replaced.

When a person allows their profession to swallow their personality out of fear, they enter a state where their self-worth becomes entirely conditional. It rises and falls based on morning metrics, a passing comment from a director, or the tone of a feedback note. If they have a good day, they feel safe, but if a project hits a snag, their entire sense of security collapses. It is an unsustainable way to live, acting like a house built on sand. They constantly run on adrenaline, anxiety, and perfectionism, which inevitably leads to severe physical and emotional exhaustion.

One of the ironies of enmeshment is that people often believe they’re making themselves indispensable, when the opposite may be true. Because organisations have used AI efficiency gains to increase capacity, fewer people are now expected to achieve more, and employees who have survived rounds of restructuring can find themselves feeling grateful to still have a job. It’s hardly surprising, then, that some begin to cling even more tightly to their work.

The longer the hours become, the easier it is to mistake visibility for value. Being the first person online or the last person to reply starts to feel like evidence you’re still needed.

What Remains Distinctly Human?

The difficulty is that none of those things necessarily demonstrates what makes a person uniquely valuable. If anything, AI has shifted that conversation in the opposite direction. Technology is becoming increasingly capable of handling structured processes, retrieving information, and producing competent first drafts. Those aren’t the areas where people now stand apart.

What remains distinctly human is judgement, context, empathy, curiosity, experience, and intuition; the ability to recognise when something doesn’t quite feel right, despite all the available data suggesting otherwise.

At Jigsaw Discovery, we see these traits not as abstract concepts, but as measurable behavioural preferences mapped out across our core profiles. Rather than guessing who possesses these strengths or forcing employees into rigid corporate boxes, mapping behavioural styles gives leaders a tangible language for identifying, validating, and unlocking these uniquely human capabilities.

These qualities rarely develop by spending another evening clearing emails. They develop through conversations outside our immediate profession. Through hobbies that challenge us in different ways. Through raising families, volunteering, travelling, reading widely, or simply spending time with people who think differently from us.

Those experiences become part of the judgement we later bring into work, even though they weren’t acquired there. Judgement isn’t built through repetition; it’s built through variety. Every time we encounter unfamiliar people, different opinions, or situations that sit outside our professional expertise, our brain gathers more reference points for interpreting future problems. We become better at recognising patterns, spotting nuance, and questioning our own assumptions.

That’s incredibly difficult to achieve if almost every waking hour is spent inside the same meetings, solving the same problems with the same group of people. It’s how echo chambers start, and there’s no bigger echo chamber than ChatGPT et al. When teams over-index in a single way of working or look to automated systems for validation, they invite massive cognitive blind spots. By visually mapping a team’s collective profile, leaders can actively shatter these echo chambers, ensuring they cultivate the creative and analytical diversity needed to navigate rapid technological disruption.

Shifting From Visibility to Behavioural Value

I’ve talked before about hours vs. output—and how the latter should be the focus of successful teams. With the adoption of AI adding extra pressure and instilling fear of redundancy, would an employee even believe their manager if they emphasised this?

It’s important they do, because AI cannot replace everything in the workplace. Humans are still key to the growth of any company. The employee who may appear the least devoted because they protect their evenings or invest time elsewhere may actually be strengthening the very qualities your organisation will need more of over the next decade.

For decades, workplaces have unintentionally rewarded the people who were always available. The employee who never declined a meeting, who always answered the late-night email, and who consistently put work before everything else… this became the benchmark for dedication.

However, the narrower someone’s world becomes, the narrower their thinking becomes, too. When almost every conversation, success, setback, and source of validation comes from work, it’s easy to lose perspective. Small problems begin to feel enormous because there’s nothing outside work to place them into context. Ironically, the people trying hardest to demonstrate value can gradually lose the wider perspective that makes good judgement possible.

The challenge is that enmeshment doesn’t only affect the individual. It changes how everyone else defines success. Colleagues begin comparing themselves to someone whose entire identity has become wrapped up in work, and suddenly, maintaining healthy boundaries starts to feel like underperforming.

That isn’t a sustainable culture, particularly at a time when organisations are asking people to become more adaptable, more creative, and more comfortable with change. Systemic and technological disruption is accelerating with each significant revolution; it really is true that the only constant we can rely on is change itself.

To pull back from this toxic loop, organisations need a deliberate cultural intervention. Moving away from monitoring performative digital presence requires leading through deep behavioural awareness; understanding how people work best and building structural spaces that foster team adaptability and true workplace resilience.

The Leader’s Real Conversation

Perhaps the conversation leaders need to start having isn’t about encouraging employees to work less. It’s about helping them understand that work was never meant to carry the full weight of someone’s identity.

The employees who will create the greatest long-term value will not be the ones who spend the most time working, but the ones who bring the richest thinking back into work. Because if AI continues to change what people do, organisations will likely find that the people who thrive aren’t those who’ve devoted every waking hour to their careers. They’ll be the ones who’ve continued to develop themselves outside their work.

Perhaps AI was never supposed to give us more time to work. Perhaps it was supposed to give us more opportunities to become the kind of people whose judgement no technology can replicate. But building that judgment requires a high degree of self-awareness and behavioural agility. At Jigsaw Discovery, our tactile 64-piece profiling tool doesn’t label your staff; it provides a map for leaders to cultivate the uniquely human, high-value workplace behaviours that AI can never replace. Discover how to anchor your team’s human architecture today.